


Atlas of the Far Side of the Moon (The Flip Side Remix)

by kisahawklin



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Backstory, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Gen, Remix, Remix Duello 2010
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-10
Updated: 2010-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-12 13:56:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kisahawklin/pseuds/kisahawklin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time Jeannie's three and a half, she knows exactly how much noise she can make to keep her parents from worrying about her and not be punished for being annoying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atlas of the Far Side of the Moon (The Flip Side Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [2ndary_author](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=2ndary_author).
  * Inspired by [Atlas of the Far Side of the Moon](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/1635) by 2ndary_author. 



_Mare Undarum (Sea of Waves) 6.8° N, 68.4° E_

By the time Jeannie's three and a half, she knows exactly how much noise she can make to keep her parents from worrying about her and not be punished for being annoying. It's Meredith's doing--even as she's only learning to read she knows he can't figure it out, he doesn't see where that line is.

 

_Lacus Doloris (Lake of Sorrow) 17.1° N, 9.0° E_

Daddy sits her in front of the piano on her fourth birthday. She doesn't touch the keyboard. She knows any sort of skill on the piano will mean automatic failure unless she is a prodigy. "Come on, Jean," Daddy says. Give it a try." She pokes at a key, and another, and immediately her mind connects the two in some basic understanding of function; she presses a third key and the sound opens up, three notes creating the basic architecture of –

Her father gasps. "Yes, Jean," he says, and sounds the root note in the bass. Jeannie struggles for a half-second that feels like forever, and erases the whole thing with a single note picked out in a high octave. The dissonance cuts through the structure they've built, ruining everything.

Daddy pets her hair, sure, she can tell, that she's a little stupid, and sets her back down to go get cake.

 

_Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms) 18.4° N, 57.4° W_

Removing herself from music lessons doesn't keep her from getting hit by the metronome her father throws in frustration when she's six; she's fast when there are slaps to go around, but she's never actually been in the path of flying objects before. She blinks and doesn't duck, and ends up with three stitches and three weeks of relative peace.

 

_Lacus Somniorum (Lake of Dreams) 38.0° N, 29.2° E_

Numbers take the place of notes for a while; this is good because it's a language she shares with Mer, one their father doesn't understand. Mommy doesn't either, but by that time she's glad to support anything that pisses Daddy off, so she brings Jeannie algebra books and slips them under her pillow while she's at school.

Mer gets his own books from the library; he's never figured out how to duck, so he's gotten used to doing things for himself. She feels bad about that, of course she does, why else would she bring him things to pass the time in the closet? By the time she's discovered numbers and the way they make structure just like notes, she and Mer have gone through several phases of communal punishment. His inability to find a way to work around their father, to _get along_ is more than social ineptitude. It's his way of protecting her, she knows even if he doesn't, and she owes him for that.

He's different in the closet. There's something more true about him in there, more vulnerable.

 

_Lacus Gaudii (Lake of Delight) 16.2° N, 12.6° E_

She hums to Mer in the closet sometimes, phrases he'll twist on themselves and turn into counterpoint. She makes him puzzles other times, or problems, or colors funny pictures and sticks them under the door. She never manages to stump him with the math or the music, but she gets him to laugh when she draws.

He likes the problems best, though, so Jeannie studies his books to try and stump him. She never does, but sometimes he doesn't figure it out for a couple of days of punishments, putting the scraps of paper in a hidey hole until he gets sent to the closet again.

 

_Lacus Perseverantiae (Lake of Perseverance) 8.0° N, 62.0° E_

When Mer skips second grade, Jeannie doesn't think anything about it. When he skips sixth, she asks to skip too. She's only a little behind Mer in her reading at home, and she's light years ahead of the kids in her class, but her mother won't allow it. "Girls must be more cunning than boys," she says, and demonstrates by signing the papers that her father won't even know about until it's too late to pull Mer back.

Jeannie nods blankly and goes back to reading any book she can find in Mer's room. The math books are easiest, but she likes some of the things he's supposed to read for English. She works the system as best she can from the inside; she takes extra-curriculars and makes friends with the older kids and asks the teachers for recommendations.

She gets into music. She has to, in self-defense, because the utter ineptitude of her father's students plodding through the scales and etudes in their lessons permeates the house. She picks rock and roll because it's loud enough to drown out the way she wants to yell at her father's students the way he used to yell at Mer.

The students have gotten worse as her father has gotten older. He doesn't throw fits anymore, or berate them loud enough to turn their ears red. He doesn't even pay attention to them, staring off in the distance like he's somewhere else. He used to be tough; he used to care. She used to watch from behind the banister in the hallway, secretly pleased because her father understood how the music was _supposed_ to be and that he was just trying to make the students better. She never really understood how the students couldn't figure out what he was talking about.

These days her father ignores the students, not even bothering to correct wrong notes, and Jeannie listens to Rick Springfield and Hall and Oates and REO Speedwagon on her headphones while she works through Mer's calculus books. She tapes things off the radio and makes sure there's no talking in between, no lull in the sound that means the mediocrity of her father's students can reach her ears.

 

_Lacus Solitudinis (Lake of Solitude) 27.8° S, 104.3° E_

Mer deserts her just as she's starting to get the hang of high school. They haven't really talked for years; the closet punishments stopped when Mer got too busy with school to be on Daddy's radar. Jeannie knows she was abandoned as soon as Mer figured out that school was freedom; she tries not to resent that it's not her freedom too.

When Mer brings her the problem he found tucked in one of the books he's packing away, she knows it's a peace offering, but she can't make herself acknowledge it. She's too mad at him for leaving her alone at the dinner table with their parents and the vast, accusing silence.

She takes it after he leaves, though, smoothes it out and puts it in her copy of _The Phantom Tollbooth_ and keeps it by her bedside.

 

_Palus Somni (Marsh of Dreams) 14.1° N, 45.0° E_

She discovers the back way into the band room one night after volleyball practice. There's a piano in there, terribly out of tune, but there and just waiting for her to sit down and plunk out a few notes.

She can still pick out notes that go together, building blocks of a structure she'll never be able to create. The math is there, though, the shimmering numbers underneath the music; the reason it works in the first place.

She picks out a simple tune, something Mer used to play when he was still trying to make their father like him. She pulls the lid down on the piano when she leaves.

 

_Lacus Lenitatis (Lake of Tenderness) 14.0° N, 12.0° E_

Music and numbers will always be intertwined in her head, like being bilingual, she thinks. She wonders if this is what it's like for people from Quebec, buffeted day in and day out with two separate but intertwined languages.

She never talks about the music with anyone; there's no one to understand, at least until Kaleb, and she would've married him for no other reason than that.

She's working on her doctorate when she meets him, in the awful student café where she likes to study. He's wearing a corduroy jacket and whistling Brahms; she can't help but look up as he passes. He passes every day for three weeks after that, mostly whistling symphonies but sometimes piano concerti or string quartets. He finally gets up the courage to speak to her on day nineteen.

"Classical music lover?" Kaleb asks, and she gives him a half-smile.

"A little," she says. "I like the symphony." She doesn't like the chamber music, too filled with silences where she can sometimes hear her father's voice.

Kaleb asks her out to the symphony the next weekend, and afterwards, she pushes him into his bedroom as Beethoven plays on the stereo.

 

_Lacus Oblivionis (Lake of Forgetfulness) 21.0° S, 168.0° W_

The screaming match with Mer wasn't unexpected; the years of radio silence were. They'd never fought that long, and when she finally gives in and calls, Mer's phone is disconnected. She researches, follows his trail as far as she can before running into the brick wall of the U.S. government. Throwing up that kind of roadblock is as definitive as you can get. She never thought she'd stop talking to Mer like she stopped talking to their parents, but maybe there was no way to hold on to a connection to anyone in the family.

 

_Lacus Temporis (Lake of Time) 45.9° N, 58.4° E_

Madison doesn't seem to like music or math, and it's a strange sort of relief for Jeannie to give up her languages for baking and Barbies. Motherhood is another language, one she wants to learn because she has always wanted to do things _right_ , but it turns out that knowing what your mother did wrong doesn't mean you aren't going to make your own mistakes. She'd stopped talking to her parents altogether well before she started dating Kaleb. Seeing him interact with his parents just drives it home that Suzanne and Nicholas McKay's relationship poisoned the whole family, and she is never going to subject her children to that. Madison has one set of loving grandparents; it will have to do.

The idea for the bridge hits her during playtime, and if she had realized the steady stream of U.S. government visitors it would bring, she would have burned the equations in the backyard. It makes her think of Mer, working somewhere top secret enough his family isn't allowed to get in touch.

It surprises her, then, when he shows up on her doorstep holding a flower and pitching the party line. It is good to see him, and knowing where he's been and what he's been doing helps with the dull ache from wondering why he hasn't published in years. Watching for his name in the journals was her only way to keep track of him after he stopped returning his calls.

 

_Lacus Spei (Lake of Hope) 43.0° N, 65.0° E_

John shows her the videotape of Mer honestly afraid he's going to die and wanting to leave something for her, make sure she knows he misses her. It's sweet, and reminds her of the boy who pretended to take days to solve her puzzles when he clearly knew the answers all along. When she gets back to Stargate Command, she has Sam Carter scan the scrap of paper she's had since she was in high school, the problem Mer found when he packed his things to leave their house. She has a feeling he'll get the message.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to 2ndary_author for being amazing and writing such a fantastic original fic with gorgeous and juicy backstory. Thanks to [](http://meghanc.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**meghanc**](http://meghanc.dreamwidth.org/) for being generally awesome and helping me kick this into (hopefully) something worthy of the original.


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